In a league of his own

Our opinion: It’s A-Rod, suspended for 211 games. And it’s A-Rod, batting cleanup for the Yankees. What gives? When will baseball make a clean break with one performance-enhancing drug scandal after another?

This should have been the summer when baseball put its long-festering steroids scandal behind it. The truly inspiring story of the game this season is Chris Davis, the Baltimore Orioles slugger. He has already hit 40 home runs and talks about closing in on one of the most storied records in all of sports.

But it’s not the forever tainted home run record of Barry Bonds that he talks of breaking, and not those of Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa, either. It’s Roger Maris, who hit 61 homers 52 years ago without the help of performance-enhancing drugs. Mr. Davis is determined to emerge as a superstar in a similar vein.

For now, however, his prowess is overshadowed by the insulting farce of Alex Rodriguez, back in action with the New York Yankees despite a suspension that’s supposed to banish him until 2015. Mr. Rodriguez is the most prominent of the 13 players — including three All-Stars — who were suspended Monday in a sweeping, if overdue, crackdown on doping.

The others at the receiving end of 50-game suspensions in connection with the alleged distribution of banned performing-enhancing drugs by Biogenesis of America responded relatively gracefully.

Not Mr. Rodriguez, whose defiance brings additional dishonor to a career that should have ended with his induction into the Hall of Fame. He’s mounting an appeal that will delay such harsh judgment against him — it’s all but impossible to seriously imagine any other outcome — until well into September.

The lone holdout, ironically enough, was on the most stringent notice of all. Mr. Rodriguez already has admitted using performance-enhancing drugs. That was sometime between 2001 and 2003, before he signed with the Yankees. It’s now that his comeuppance comes.

It’s within his rights — ensured by the baseball players association, probably the most powerful labor union in America these days — to fight to what might be the end. Mr. Rodriguez will turn 40 halfway through the 2015 season. It’s a pathetic sight to watch him behave more like a crafty criminal defendant than a once-awesome ballplayer.

Baseball isn’t a court. The niceties of civil liberties and due process, so essential in the real world, have a more limited application. It’s credibility beyond all suspicion that needs to prevail, not guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That means a demonstrable absence of cheating on the scale that steroids and other drugs allow.

“It is no longer possible to believe these performance-enhancing drugs are not an existential threat to all of competitive athletics,” former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week. “We cannot let things come to the point where the Yankees’ success depends more on who their chemist is than on the quality of their pitching.”

That’s why Mr. Vincent thinks baseball should have no more tolerance for such drug use as it does for gambling — a problem that expulsion on the first offense has been able to eradicate.

Good riddance, then, to Mr. Rodriguez. Oh, he might hit another home run or two, just like he did during a recent stint in the minor leagues. But it’s the likes of Mr. Davis we’re rooting for — for the good of a game that can only survive, as Mr. Vincent says, as long as it’s defined by its rules.

7 Responses

Please- lets not refer to him as Mr. Rodriguez, he doesn’t deserve that in any way, shape, or form. Call him A-Rod, A-Roid, Al, little guy, dimwhit, needles, whatever you want, but please don’t show him respect he doesn’t deserve.

The changes will happen once the player’s union gets on board with ending the illegal scamming and the clubs collectively stop paying a million bucks in salaries per week and player.
But that’s not the only thing that is wrong with baseball. It takes hours to finish a game during which most of the time absolutely nothing happens. And after a season of over 160 games played it is still not clear who has the best team? So playoffs are needed that end in the “World Series”. That alone shows the excessive arrogance that the league and this “sport” shows.
Even cycling is more interesting despite the rampant cheating!

What about Jeter? He is one of the few great players from the PED era who hasn’t been linked to drugs. Yes, Davis is great right now and exciting to watch, but Jeter has been performing on a high level for almost 20 years.

Maybe if A-Rod wasn’t a doper he wouldn’t have had to have two hip surgeries.

Maybe if MLB had a real commissioner it wouldn’t put up with this nonsense.
@Billy DeLap,
What Jeter has to do with this I’m not sure I understand. He certainly had a Hall of Fame career, but he’s basically done too. He is 39 now and breaking down, just like A-Rod.